Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

Most of the libraries from Harmattan are already existing in Maemo 5 or can easily be ported/updated so the only obstacle to execute Harmattan binaries should be the hardfp (and maybe thumb?) requirements.

Maybe it's a silly question but, does anybody know if it would be possible to emulate via software the hardfp needed to execute Harmattan applications in the N900?

To me it sounds like the i387 support that was emulated in the Linux kernel many years ago for computers that didn't have a coprocessor.

Anyone with a deeper knowledge of that?

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

no its better go n900CE the closest is using n900CE that is already using hardfb

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

softfp emulates fp operations on arm. It can exploit the physical implementation if such exists.

Even when physical implementation exists, it still has certain overhead.

The hardfp relies on physical implementation and removes the overhead.

In short: no

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort

Fremantle = softfp
Harmattan = hard

It has nothing to do with the available or not of a floating point coprocessor. Remember that both the N900 and the N950 share a very similar A8 core.

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

But what you are saying implies that a Harmattan binary could be run on Fremantle, though slower, if dependencies, environment variables, etc are correct (like preenv do for WebOs games).

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

http://nullr0ute.com/2011/06/fedora-...-bring-up-fad/
http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic...h11s02s02.html

'nuff' said.

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

thing is both has support for hardfb but its not supported in fremantle OS.

You have to compile every damn library including GCC dependies.

However this has been done in N900CE. Means CE is more "compatible" with Harmattan.

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

No it does not Harmattan and Fremantle are OS. I am talking about actual hardware.

Softfp will exploit hardware floating point unit if such is available, if not it will handle it in software.

Re: Is it possible to emulate hardfp?
 

No, that emulation is done by the kernel and can be done in soft, softfp and hard (albeit it obviously doesn't make sense in soft, but it does in softfp). So it has nothing to do with hardware but with software -- mikecomputing is mostly right.

Read the Debian link I quoted above. Even the Fedora blogpost gets it wrong.